Thursday, April 3, 2008

iApplicants is pleased to announce a new way to increase your applicant pool and better engage your careers site visitors using automated job alerts via email or RSS feed. It’s FREE for iApplicants clients, and we do all the setup for you!

The Challenge:

In studying the visitor data for our applicant tracking career sites (each client has a Google Analytics Account), there were two stats that stood out to me.

A majority of careers site visitors do not complete an application

And 30% to 40% of visitors are have already visited the site before

There are various reasons for both of these statistics, but regardless of the reason, this data posted a problem. We are missing a valuable opportunity to collect contact information on the majority of visitors who come to the careers site, and we are leaving it up to the job seekers to remember to return to the career site in hopes that their dream job is now available.

Solution:

The solution is to allow career site visitors to have the option to signup for job notification alerts, without having to apply for a job or create an account. We wanted seekers to have a wide range of different options for controlling how they receive job updates. FeedBurner provided us with a powerful solution to accomplish this task, and in the upcoming weeks we will launch a second tool using Twitter.com to further expand the job alert choices.

iApplicants Feeds Jobs to FeedBurner with RSS:

Each iApplicants site now has an RSS job feed, which includes the 15 most recent job listings, that can be turned on and pushed to FeedBurner. If you don’t know what RSS is, let me explain. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a way for a website with regularly changing content to allow people to stay informed about the changes without actually returning to the website to view it. It is used by news sites, blogs, and various other sites to keep their readers/visitors informed.

By giving the RSS feed to FeedBurner it becomes an RSS feed on steroids. FeedBurner provides different ways to distribute the job listings based on the desires of the job seeker.

How it Works:

If we turn on the Job Alerts feature, the search jobs page now has a box titled “Get Notified of New Jobs at Your Company” with choices for the job seeker on how they will be notified.

Automated Email Alerts:

Each day FeedBurner will check your job feed for new listings. If there are any new listings, the job seeker will receive a custom email including the new jobs and links to click on that take them to the job listing page.Job seekers only receive an email when there is a new job posted.

Jobs Listed on Personal Homepage:

If a job seeker has a personalized home page on their computer, such as those provided by MyYahoo and iGoogle, they can add a section that has your most recent jobs. They will then see your jobs every time they open their Internet browser.

Jobs Feed to RSS Readers

Many people use an RSS reader such as Google Reader to stay on top of all of the information they are interested in. Along side all of their favorite news stories and blog posts will be your newest job listings.

Republish your Jobs to Another Website Using HTML

FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost will let your job seekers, or even your employees publish your job listings on any other website using html. This includes their personal website or even to a page on your company’s website or blog. Below is an example of what this might look like:

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: Powered by FeedBurner

Create a Job Widget

Similar to the BuzzBoost above, a SpringWidget allows someone to post a graphic with your job feed on a website or blog. This allows your seekers or employees to publish your feed on websites, blogs, messages boards, and even social networking sites like MySpace.com. Below is an example of what a SpringWidget might look like:

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Online Recruiting & Tracking

iApplicants™ blog is intended to provide a discussion on ideas and tips to help employers be more productive with their hiring process. Including helping them expand their applicant pool, reduce their recruiting costs, and better manage their employment applications.

About iApplicants™

For Employers of 20 to 2000iApplicants™ provides Employer Careers Websites and Application Management Systems designed to be Flexible, Easy to Use, and Inexpensive. Even the smallest employer can afford to leave their paper application behind for a web-based hiring system. Our system is powerful enough to get the job done, but easy enough that your receptionist could run it!